A week ago this Ashes series, beginning so soon after the summer's dampish squib and some desolutory prep, seemed like it might a truly tepid affair.
The best crops come from plants that can be kept dampish in summer and dryish in winter.
The resulting twelve lines, four neat tercets, draw upon the oblique angles of childhood, the only time in our life when we know what being very small is like, and the time when we are most likely to be flush with the earth, on our knees or bellies or sides in the dirt: I was four but I turned four hundred maybe Encountering the ancient dampish feel Of a clay floor.
He knew the new-build estates and the spread and bungalow drift of the ever-changing villages, and the backways of townlands, and the gardens of priests, and the old walled demesnes, just as he knew the lairs of ripe widows, and the dampish, seablown, lavatorial odor of beachside apartments, and knew the tin-roofed sheds, the outbuildings, the caves.
Her hand was warm, lying there in his, dampish, fingers interlaced with his.
Like a bag: Well, I felt to the right, and my fingers touched something curved, that felt — yes — more or less like leather; dampish it was, and evidently part of a heavy, full thing.
Q To get to the sunny part of our garden, we have to walk through a small, darkish, dampish yard.
Angelica can become a weed, too, thanks to its great scatter of seed, which, given dampish, rich soil, will become a thicket of stately plants.
A going change to start the three-day National meeting at Aintree, where 5mm of rain during what Andrew Tulloch, the clerk of the course, describes as a "dampish" night has left the going soft, good-to-soft in places on both the National course and the hurdles circuit.
After a decade of dampish squibs, this pairing always felt like a proper Cup final, with two teams up for the trophy for a change and not regarding the showpiece as an inconvenience or a consolation prize.
